Fruit Juice in a Carton – the Truth

I have wanted to do this post for quite a while now. I think it is quite important that we begin to question the things that we have locally available.

Loads of people opt for “Fruit Juice” at parties and at restaurants and even at home, thinking that they are getting something very close to freshly squeezed juice and nothing else. That is really not the case…at all.

To make my point, I have a few points that are worth pondering on:

  • When you squeeze or press your juices, do you get the same taste every time? No, right?  It tastes different because mother nature does not give you the same taste from fruit to fruit. Heck! when you cut a pineapple, the bottom is usually sweeter than the top, so you can get two different tastes from one fruit. However no matter how many different batches of the same brand of carton “fruit” juice you  drink, they all taste exactly the same. Interesting, right?
  • Thanks to irrigation, there are many fruits that you can get year round – pineapples, oranges but not all of them are available. Mango is a good example. Yet, we have Mango Fruit Juice on our supermarket shelves every single day. No skipping a beat. I don’t have to go into how they have managed to make it possible as you can find fantastic information on it here and here.
  • Some of our local Nigerian Carton Fruit Juices say that there is NO SUGAR added. Fantastic, right? Not so much. There are sweeteners that are worse than sugar and if the claim that there is no added sugar is correct, then some sweetener MUST be going into those cartons because the juices are always sweet.

To give a balanced view (which I very much believe in), I want to acknowledge that there is actual fruit going into these cartons but the percentage and the quality is not something I can speak on.

There is a lot more to this topic and if you follow the links that I gave above, you will find out more.

My advice, as always is to keep it natural. Squeeze or press your own juices for yourself and your family. It takes more effort than taking a carton off a supermarket shelf but you get so very much more out of it.

When you go out to eat and feel like having some juice, ask for Freshly squeezed juice and go further by asking if they put any sweeteners in it.

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